P. Casier (CGIAR). For example, CGIAR Research Progamme on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security Director Dr. Bruce Campbell, contributed a blog post to the Huffington Post on June 11 discussing the future of agriculture and the environment – stating the urgent need to adapt to continue to feed the growing population of the world. Additionally, he noted, "Agriculture is the single largest employer in the world. It provides a livelihood for 40 percent of today's global population … and is the largest source of income and jobs for poor rural households."

A newly introduced breed of supergoat is cutting the number of months per year that villagers in the district of Nyando go hungry.

CGIAR Climate's insight:

The goats were brought to Nyando by scientists at the CGIAR, a global agricultural research partnership to improve food security. The goats are part of the partnership's "climate smart villages" project, which helps farmers in the developing world adapt to climate change.

Agriculture needs a "radical transformation" to produce more food in increasingly difficult environmental conditions, says Dr. James Kinyangi, who leads the project in east Africa. "Farmers must become more climate smart," he says.

A new study has identified several varieties of beans that are best suited to survive the globe's warming climate.

CGIAR Climate's insight:

Recent climate models raised concerns that the production of beans -- a staple crop and vital source of protein for millions around the world, especially in Latin America and Africa -- could be wiped out by rising temperatures. Most bean plants are especially sensitive to heat.

In response to these fears, researchers at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) began scouring their seed repository for bean varieties hardy and adaptable enough to thrive on a warming planet.

We will need to grow more leguminous crops in the future so great that instead of losing bean lineages, there has been an effort to save them and identify the ones that can be grown at higher temperatures!

A breakthrough in the development of temperature-resilient beans could help sustain a vital source of protein for millions of people around the globe.

CGIAR Climate's insight:

Climate projections suggest that 50% of the countries' bean production will be lost by 2050 if farmers do not have access to the new variety of bean.

The discovery was made by plant breeders at CGIAR, a global agricultural research group.

One of the plant breeders involved in the research, Steve Beebe - a senior bean researcher at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) - explained that bean plants were, as a rule, very sensitive to excessive heat.

Whilst it is true that women farmers have less access to training, land, and inputs than their male counterparts, we need to debunk a few myths that have long been cited as fact, that are a bad basis for policy decision-making.

New research, drawing on work done by IFPRI and others, presented in Paris this week by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security will start this process.

Every stance that men take in the fight for gender equality is critical. But there is one particular group of women who remain the most marginalised: rural women, especially women farmers. We need to take "HeforShe" to the farm....

CGIAR Climate's insight:

So how can the gender gap in agriculture be addressed? The CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security hosted a seminar this week to spark discussions on how to protect the food security and incomes of rural communities in the face of climate change.

Analysts and policymakers are looking at converting the wet savannas of Africa into farmlands. But a new study shows that this conversion will come at a high cost to the environment and will not meet the standards for renewable fuels.

CGIAR Climate's insight:

The researchers determined that each country should have an analysis of its own productivity, as well as any environmental impact involved before considering mass land conversions. The overall impact of the release of high levels of stored carbon from cultivated lands and the high cost in terms of lost species really has to be considered.

"One basic lesson is that Africa's wet savannas deserve more environmental respect than they get," said Phil Thornton, a co-author and senior researcher with the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security.

Timothy Searchinger and colleagues modelled the carbon and biodiversity cost of farming a wide range of ‘suitable’ (having sufficient soil moisture for agriculture) African savannahs, shrublands and woodlands. They found that only very small proportions of this land area, two to three per cent for maize and 10 per cent for soybeans, can be converted to high yielding cropland without high carbon costs.

'Africa could be on the brink of an agricultural revolution. Political commitment to the sector is thankfully gaining momentum as an effective route to bring African populations out of hunger and p...

CGIAR Climate's insight:

Africa’s agriculture has great potential, and its development will be a necessity in order to feed growing populations. But we should dispel the myth that Africa’s land is available to fill global rather than local needs.

Within Africa, government policy should focus as much as possible on boosting yields on existing cropland.Where some cropland expansion is necessary, the task should be to find land that will produce relatively high yields at relatively low environmental cost, and should focus on serving Africa’s regional food needs first.

There is a great need for scientists to map these lands carefully at a much finer level of detail than our project could undertake. Governments could then guide conversion only of those lands with the most appropriate trade-offs.

A new alliance aims to help farmers raise productivity, adapt to climate change, and reduce agricultural emissions

CGIAR Climate's insight:

With so many competing and complex problems, one may wonder where to begin. At the Global Forum for Innovations in Agriculture in Abu Dhabi this week, the international agricultural research network CGIAR and key agencies drove forward a new global movement that is ready to tackle these challenges.

The Global Alliance for Climate-Smart Agriculture (GACSA) is a new collaborative initiative dedicated to ensuring food security in the face of a warming world, which will enable farmers to raise productivity, adapt to climate change, and reduce the impact agriculture has on global greenhouse gas emissions.

Tanzania\'s leading online News Edition (The National Newspaper). Get access to the most current and latest authoritative news on local issues, politics, events, celebrations, editorial, columnists, features, people and business

CGIAR Climate's insight:

The project, launched last year, is supporting Uganda and Tanzania in the development of policies that are climate resilient; it is led by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and is part of the CGIAR Research Programme on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) Flagship Programme on Policies and Institutions on Climate-Resilient Food Systems.

Africa Science News Service | Reporting about African science with an African eye

CGIAR Climate's insight:

The project which was launched last year is supporting Uganda and Tanzania in the development of policies that are climate resilient; it is funded by the CGIAR’s Climate Change and Food Security (CCAFS) program and led by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA).

When it comes to climate change, Vietnam is one of the most vulnerable countries in the world. Sarah Piccini discovers how Delta farmers are working ...

CGIAR Climate's insight:

Climate Smart Villages already exist in South Asia, Latin America and West and East Africa. There, the Climate Change Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) project has successfully helped rural communities boost their productivity, increase incomes and build resilience to extreme weather events like floods and droughts.

In 2013, CCAFS chose to expand to Southeast Asia, a global hotspot for greenhouse gas emissions from rice cultivation and deforestation. In addition to the three villages in Vietnam, which will be located in the northwest, north central and southern regions of the country, CCAFS plans to build two in Laos and one in Cambodia.

The global population is estimated to rise to 9.2 billion in 2050, and to feed us all, it has been calculated that we will need 70% more food production. The need to find more sustainable sources of food has led governments and intergovernmental groups such as the World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN and even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to look for supplementary, and alternative, regions to grow crops, both for food and biofuels. One type of habitat that is getting a lot of focus, and is assumed to be suitable is wet savannah, particularly those in Africa. But these habitats, with their sufficient rainfall and lack of dense cover, argues Tim Searchinger in Nature Climate Change this week, are not a low environmental cost solution for converting to cropland. Based on new studies, he estimates only 2% of these areas would be suitable for growing maize with carbon levels less than the average and that the threat to biodiversity is another reason for the world’s leaders to seek alternative sources of food.

Scientists have hailed the emergence of heat-tolerant beans, but there are fears corporate interests in Africa’s seed sector will wrest control from local farmers

CGIAR Climate's insight:

In 2012, CGIAR researchers began to test more than 1,000 types of beans in a bid to find “heat beater” beans able to grow amid high temperatures and drought. Scientists cultivated test plots on Colombia’s Caribbean coast and in greenhouses, before eventually discovering 30 heat-tolerant bean types that can withstand a 4C increase in temperature. CGIAR said it used natural breeding to discover the seed.

Research centre is expected to generate more cost-effective and precise greenhouse gas emissions measurements

CGIAR Climate's insight:

CIFOR scientist Mariana Rufino sees the climate change work being done in Kenya as part of an effort to provide Kenya with support for its National Climate Change Action Plan, drawn up in 2013. In addition to the crucial data that can be produced and analyzed thanks to the sophisticated equipment in the lab, which she said can improve the quality of data and thus the greenhouse gas inventories, it will also provide an extremely important training ground for young technicians and scientists from Kenya and elsewhere in Africa.

With the global population rising, analysts and policymakers have targeted Africa’s vast wet savannas as a place to produce staple foods and bioenergy groups at

CGIAR Climate's insight:

“One simple doctrine is that Africa’s soppy savannas merit some-more environmental honour than they get,” pronounced Phil Thornton, a co-author and comparison researcher with a CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security.

More than 700 participants coming from 75 different countries around the world convened at the 3rd Global Science Conference on Climate-Smart Agriculture in Montpellier, France, 16-18 March 2015 to share their experience and agree on global and specific research agendas. The conference gathered representatives from scientific organizations, national and international governmental organizations, farmers’ associations, industries, NGOs and civil society.

“One simple doctrine is that Africa’s soppy savannas merit some-more environmental honour than they get,” pronounced Phil Thornton, a co-author and comparison researcher with a CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security.

"One basic lesson is that Africa's wet savannas deserve more environmental respect than they get," said Phil Thornton, a co-author and senior researcher with the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security.

Shift in farming techniques reduces number of households eating one or no meals each day.

CGIAR Climate's insight:

The African sites are part of an effort to turn villages on five continents into labs, testing new farming techniques, crop varieties and livestock breeds to improve food security in the face of climate change. Run by the CGIAR, a global partnership focused on agricultural research for food security, the project will present initial results from its 22 'climate-smart villages' at a conference in Montpellier, France, on 16–18 March.

Dr. Patric Brandt of the Research Program on Climate Change Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), which specializes in global warming research, participated in the study, adding, "We know from studies around the world that if rainforests are stressed by the combined impacts of climate change and land-disturbances, there is little hope in maintaining their ecosystem benefits for people or wildlife over the long term."

Cloud computing supports reaching the goals of open access in agriculture.

CGIAR Climate's insight:

In December, we took a major step forward to making data more accessible. We published the Global Circulation Models (GCM) from the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change and Food Security (CCAFS) on the Amazon Cloud, AWS.

In Bangladesh, more land is becoming salty and unfit for growing crops. It’s a pressing problem in this densely-populated country where most people farm for a living. But even on saline land...

CGIAR Climate's insight:

WorldFish Center, an international non-profit, introduced vertical gardens in Bangladesh.

Dr. Craig Meisner, South Asia country director for WorldFish Center, based in Dhaka, said, “There is no country with such population density where natural resources are stretched to their very limits.”

He added that if climate change adaptation “fails here it will certainly fail in many other countries. However, if it succeeds here it gives hope for the world’s future.”

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